Candy and Poison

The night-life denizens of Parker Day’s portrait series “Icons.”

Parker Day grew up hanging around her father’s comic-book shop, in San Jose. There were certain shelves, the ones with explicit comics by the likes of R. Crumb, that she was not allowed to browse, so she would dream up her own stories inspired by the covers of the forbidden works. More recently, after returning to photography—a subject she studied in school but gave up when she became a hairdresser and then a night-life promoter—she fell into a similar habit. Searching social media for strangers she might be interested in photographing, she would find a subject—a goth or a drag queen, say—and start to spin stories about what might be beneath the person’s surface.

Day’s ongoing project “Icons,” a collection of portraits of d.j.s, models, club kids, and other night-life denizens and creative types, grew out of this longstanding interest in inventing characters. Her subjects tend to possess a baseline of conspicuous personal style (to begin the series, Day asked a group of fellow-artists on Facebook, “Where the freaks at?”), but together with Day they embellish their looks to create someone new. To come up with the first portrait in the series, for instance, Day asked her subject if there was a specific character she wanted to inhabit. “A sketchy porn director” is how the photographer recalls the response.

To complete “Icons,” Day plans to collect a total of a hundred photographs. This summer, she flew to New York to shoot a new batch of people, a selection of whom are featured here. She worked away from her extensive costume racks and prop stashes this time, so her subjects needed mostly to style themselves. Still, it was hard to resist bringing along some accouterments. When I spoke to Day recently by phone, she was finishing an order on Amazon: a prairie-girl costume, a sickle, finger puppets. “It must have looked very strange in the X-ray machine,” she said of the packed suitcase she had brought on her trip east.

Seashell Coker, twenty-two, musician and model, New York, 2016.

The figures in the New York chapter of “Icons” have names like Seashell Coker, That Girl Sussi, and Dick van Dick. (The third is the only New York subject Day knew in real life before photographing him.) They are artists, graphic designers, models, and musicians—the sorts who might wake up to a text about modelling for a friend’s show, then slip in and out of a few art-school classes, and much, much later, d.j. a monthly event with a colorful name. As with all the photos in the series, these are drenched in bright comic-book colors and rendered in bold lines like illustrations. But, as in a John Waters film or a Grimms’ fairy tale, the sugary details often seem barely able to mask some dark current rising to the surface. For each lollipop, teddy bear, or rose-colored hair bow, there is a dead-eyed facial expression or a mouth full of messed-up teeth. Day calls the sensibility “the candy coating on some rat poison.”

The characters in “Icons” are not “icons” in the common sense—none are yet close to being household names, however many Instagram followers they’ve managed to collect. But in Day’s stylized configurations they come across as capacious symbols as much as earthly people. “You don’t know where they’ve come from, where they’re going, but there’s a little bit of madness in their eyes,” she said. “Maybe I’m just seeing a reflection of myself.”